A version of the Church-Turing Thesis states that every e#ectively realizable physical system can be defined by Turing Machines (`Thesis P'); in this formulation the Thesis appears an empirical, more than a logico-mathematical, proposition. We review the main approaches to computation beyond Turing definability (`hypercomputation'): supertask, non-well-founded, analog, quantum, and retrocausal computation. These models depend on infinite computation, explicitly or implicitly, and appear physically implausible; moreover, even if infinite computation were realizable, the Halting Problem would not be a#ected. Therefore, Thesis P is not essentially di#erent from the standard Church-Turing Thesis.

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Abstract. We review the philosophical framework of mathematical conceptualism as an alternative to set-theoretic foundations and show how mainstream mathematics can be developed on this basis. The paper includes an explicit axiomatization of the basic principles of conceptualism in a formal system CM set in the language of third order arithmetic. This paper is part of a project whose goal is to make a case that mathematics should be disassociated from set theory. The reasons for wanting to do this, which I discuss in greater detail elsewhere ([22]; see also [19] and [23]), involve both the philosophical unsoundness of set theory and its practical irrelevance to mainstream mathematics. Set theory is based on the reification of a collection as a separate object, an elementary philosophical error. Not only is this error obvious, it also has the spectacular consequence of immediately giving rise to the classical set theoretic paradoxes. Of course, these paradoxes are not derivable in the standard axiomatizations of set theory, but that is only because these systems were specifically designed to avoid them. In these systems the paradoxes are blocked by means of ad hoc restrictions on the set concept that have no obvious intuitive justification, which has led to the development of a large literature of attempted rationalizations

This paper investigates the view that digital hypercomputing is a good reason for rejection or re-interpretation of the Church-Turing thesis. After suggestion that such re-interpretation is historically problematic and often involves attack on a straw man (the ‘maximality thesis’), it discusses proposals for digital hypercomputing with “Zeno-machines”, i.e. computing machines that compute an infinite number of computing steps in finite time, thus performing supertasks. It argues that effective computing with Zeno-machines falls into a dilemma: either they are specified such that they do not have output states, or they are specified such that they do have output states, but involve contradiction. Repairs though noneffective methods or special rules for semi-decidable problems are sought, but not found. The paper concludes that hypercomputing supertasks are impossible in the actual world and thus no reason for rejection of the Church-Turing thesis in its traditional interpretation. 1